`Tupac' is a lopsided look at the rapper's complex life

Tupac Amaru Shakur was a rapper with a beautiful, doe-eyed face, immense talent and a booming, authoritative voice the likes of which hasn't been heard since Public Enemy's Chuck D. was in full roar.

Tupac Amaru Shakur, a dazzling success story, was also a mass of contradictions who died young and violently, in a hail of bullets.

"Tupac: Resurrection" is a biopic that relies upon archival footage--some old, some new--to make some sense out of a life that doesn't make any sense, taken at face value.

Genius or idiot? Pawn or self-styled Machiavelli (for an album, he even adopted the name, "Makaveli")?

In this film, Shakur is omnipresent, for this is his view of his world--through notebooks, poetry, music and a cultivated public image. His voice is the narration as movie editor Richard Calderon opts for a "Pac's eye" view of this world. This makes "Resurrection" manipulative and lopsided, as in when its initial views swoop in from above, from on high. Get it? We learn of his difficult childhood--crack-addicted mother, growing up poor--details of which have the ring of a confessional, meant to elicit a mass, sympathetic "Awwww . . . "

This movie isn't really sure what it wants to be. So it tries to be a silent witness, which is impossible because there were choices made when selecting the materials for this film, and before that Shakur made choices when he decided how much access to give to his life.

Combined here, the material amounts to a big, fat "Oops, my bad" from beyond the grave.

Sure, Shakur had "thug life" tattooed on his stomach, but those words were a homily, he says. In his words, being a thug is about the poor not taking the oppression of society any longer, and standing up for their rights.

That he complicated that message by living a real thug life by perpetrating beatdowns on people shouldn't matter--do as I say, not as I do--the rapper and his posthumous legacy would have us believe.

We see his youth, his rise to fame, his mistakes, successes and apologies. Shakur is capable of immense thoughtfulness, and astounding idiocy. The talent is as evident as the impending doom. This is a life that can't end well, and it doesn't.

Still, ultimately, "Resurrection" is for fans. It goes into detail about the rapper's life, with new performance and behind-the-scenes footage that Pac-o-philes will adore.

Yet this film could have been made extraordinary by universalizing Shakur's life--trying to get at the causes behind the violence, the anger, the tragedy. There are countless Shakurs in inner-city neighborhoods, but when their lives spiral out of control, no cameras are there.

Instead we're left with fluff such as "The only thing that can kill me is death--even then my music will live on forever," augmented by images of people in different countries, clutching Shakur recordings.

The tragedy of dying young, not only for a performer like Shakur but for almost anyone, is the unrealized potential. We'll never know if he would have become the rapper and artist that his promise suggested; or the violent thug he suggested just as eloquently.

The biggest problem with the muddled mea culpa that is "Tupac," is that it is a kiss-up, rather than a real examination of the rapper's life, so that anyone can speculate about what he might have become.